What’s extraordinary about Gregory Mosher’s beautifully observed production of “A View From the Bridge” is how ordinary most of it feels. Very little in this revival of Arthur Miller’s kitchen-sink drama with knives, which opened Sunday night at the Cort Theater, calls loudly for our consideration. Voices are often kept to a just audible murmur, and the Hollywood sheen of the show’s big-name stars, Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson, has been dimmed to a matte finish.

Watching the daily rituals of the small family in mid-1950s Red Hook, Brooklyn, made up of the characters so exquisitely played by Mr. Schreiber, Ms. Johansson and Jessica Hecht, feels like spying across the alley on neighbors who would normally be invisible to you. Yet there’s no question of not paying them the attention that Miller demands.

Looking closely, you notice hairline fissures of unease. What has been cozy becomes, by degrees, claustrophobic, and even if you don’t know the play’s outcome, you’re apt to discover a knot in your stomach. A part of you feels that you should stand up and yell, to defuse tension and deflect disaster, though, as one character notes retrospectively, “nothing at all had really happened.”

Even more than with “Death of a Salesman,” Miller used “Bridge” to sell his theory that true tragic heroes may well emerge from the common run of contemporary lives. So eager was he to make the point that he even included a one-man Greek chorus, an Italian-born lawyer named Alfieri (here played by Michael Cristofer), who speaks loftily about the grandeur of the story’s “bloody course” of incestuous longings and fatal consequences.

Perhaps Miller felt that plays, like classical heroes, required tragic flaws, and thus provided one for “Bridge” in the form of the long-winded Alfieri. This drama needs no annotator or apologist if it’s acted with the naturalistic refinement — and accumulation of revelatory detail — found in this interpretation.

I had wondered if “Bridge” really needed another revival. New York saw a first-rate production only a dozen years ago, directed by Michael Mayer, with Anthony LaPaglia, Allison Janney and the young Brittany Murphy (who died at 32 last year). But this latest incarnation makes the case that certain plays, like certain operas, are rich enough to be revisited as often and as long as there are performers with strong, original voices and fresh insights.

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Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Mosher’s approach is more sotto voce than Mr. Mayer’s was and more intimately focused. The play’s first scenes in the crowded apartment of Eddie Carbone (Mr. Schreiber) have a prosaic quietness. Eddie returns to his apartment from a hard day at the docks to be greeted warmly by Catherine (Ms. Johansson), the 17-year-old niece he has raised with his wife, Beatrice (Ms. Hecht), as his own daughter.

You’re struck by the easy, affectionate interplay between Eddie and Catherine, and by the more fretful, but still amiable, rapport of Eddie and his wife. There is at first glance nothing wrong with this picture.

When you hear the family will be taking in two Italian cousins of Beatrice’s — young men in need of work (and illegally in the country) — you figure that though the apartment is already crowded, the Carbones can handle the company. Even after the arrival of Marco (Corey Stoll) and his younger brother, Rodolpho (Morgan Spector), the politely regulated tension that you sense could arise simply from too many people in too small a space.

But as he has demonstrated repeatedly onstage (“Talk Radio,” “Betrayal”), Mr. Schreiber registers changes in emotional temperature with organic physical precision. At one point, maybe 20 minutes into the show, I looked at his face and it had acquired that drawn, stripped look that comes from sleepless nights. There was no doubting that Eddie Carbone was headed for some kind of breakdown, or that Mr. Schreiber had been gently steering you toward this perception since his first appearance.

Mr. Schreiber is such a complete actor that he has often thrown productions into imbalance, highlighting the inadequacy of the performances around him. That is not a problem here. That the excellent stage veteran Ms. Hecht holds her own with Mr. Schreiber is no surprise. That Ms. Johansson does — with seeming effortlessness — is.

In recent years Broadway’s stages have been littered with dim performances from bright screen stars, including Julia Roberts and Katie Holmes. Film actresses as famous as Ms. Johansson tend to create their own discomfort zones onstage, defined by the mixed expectations of fans and skeptics. I was definitely aware of that zone when I saw Keira Knightley in “The Misanthrope” in London recently.

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From left, Jessica Hecht, Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Spector and Liev Schreiber.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

By comparison, Ms. Johansson melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears. Her Catherine is a girl on the cusp of womanhood, feeling her way down familiar paths that have suddenly been shrouded in unfamiliar shadows.

The production’s three stars form a closely drawn, illuminating graph of degrees of awareness: Ms. Hecht’s taut, vigilant Beatrice is the most fully conscious, forever taking the measure of what’s amiss. Mr. Schreiber’s Eddie is a study in denial, startled and baffled by physical manifestations of lust and sorrow. Ms. Johansson’s Catherine exists between the two, slowly becoming cognizant of what Beatrice already knows and Eddie refuses to admit.

As the young Italian who falls in love with Catherine, Mr. Spector is burdened by an unfortunate blond coif and by having had to step in for Santino Fontana, a fine actor who left the production after a physical injury. Yet Mr. Spector’s Rodolpho is both as silly and serious as he needs to be, and becomes a credible catalyst to grim events. Mr. Stoll is excellent as the relatively silent Marco. And Mr. Cristofer finds a bona fide character within his thankless narrator’s role.

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The subtlety that imbues every performance is extended to the unobtrusive stylishness of Jane Greenwood’s 1950s costumes, Peter Kaczorowski’s melancholy lighting and John Lee Beatty’s revolving set. For the show’s still shocking climactic scene, Mr. Beatty’s streetscape of Brooklyn tenements has quietly shifted to suggest a much older world, of ancient coliseums where blood darkens stones.

Without your being entirely aware of it, you have been ushered to exactly where Miller wants you to be: the realm of classical tragedy. And to the cast’s infinite credit you realize that these characters not only belong in this world at this moment, but that on some level they always have.

A version of this review appears in print on January 25, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A View From Brooklyn Of Tragedy Most Classic. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

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